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Monday, August 22, 2011

He said she said

As I said elsewhere this morning, there is one problem with consciously dedicating yourself to the pursuit of The Real. Eventually you get to the point where you look around the modern world and realise it has gone totally bonko-screaming-nuts.

As Kathy pointed out, newspapers used to have to at least pretend to be about reality. Now they go along with this bizarre mass delusion that your "gender" (the correct word is "sex", though the strangely puritanical world of pansexualism doesn't like to use that word) can be changed by cutting off your bits and dosing yourself up with drugs. Now, they have to call a man who's had his bits cut off "her" and "she". Why? Did anyone tell them to? I wonder who that might have been. And why the newspapers didn't just laugh and give them the number of a reputable shrink.

What the hell happened in 1973 to make the entire medical establishment go insane?

Even this guy, who was there at the time, doesn't seem to know.

When the practice of sex-change surgery first emerged back in the early 1970s, I would often remind its advocating psychiatrists that with other patients, alcoholics in particular, they would quote the Serenity Prayer, “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Where did they get the idea that our sexual identity (“gender” was the term they preferred) as men or women was in the category of things that could be changed?

...

The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women. They wore high heels, copious makeup, and flamboyant clothing; they spoke about how they found themselves able to give vent to their natural inclinations for peace, domesticity, and gentleness—but their large hands, prominent Adam’s apples, and thick facial features were incongruous (and would become more so as they aged). Women psychiatrists whom I sent to talk with them would intuitively see through the disguise and the exaggerated postures. “Gals know gals,” one said to me, “and that’s a guy.”

Did absolutely no one pay attention in grade ten biology class? Did everyone else miss the bit where we were told that your sex is determined at the moment when the two sets of genes from mummy and daddy meshed together? Oh yes, of course. If we acknowledged that, we would have to admit that you are who you are from that moment too, which would force millions more public funding to be spent by the abortion industry convincing the world that it's OK to murder inconvenient people.

There is not one part of this story that does not make me cringe in horror and sadness:

- the man who divorced and became mentally ill, who was encouraged to embrace his delusions by the trendy medical establishment to the point of allowing them to cut his parts off and poison him with hormones. Who then changed his mind and found himself mutilated and deformed and unable to have children;

- the girl who hated herself so much she could not eat and almost died;

- the fact that no one in their lives has cautioned them about their decision because now the only thing anyone is allowed to say to anyone else, no matter what bat-sh__ crazy thing they want to do, is "I'll support you whatever decision you make".

I don't know, maybe it's not totally hopeless...

He is currently seeking funding for a documentary titled The Sex Change Delusion[Good luck with that...].

"Based on my own experiences, I believe sex-change operations should not be allowed, and certainly not on the NHS.

"People who think they are a woman trapped in a male body are, in my opinion, completely deluded. I certainly was. I needed counselling, not a sex-change operation.

"In many ways I see myself a victim of the medical profession. Even with the glamour of Samantha Kane and the £100,000 I spent on myself, I had people shouting abuse at me and builders throwing stones at me from rooftops," he says.

"I became a woman. [No, you didn't. That's why construction workers threw things at you in the streets.] It didn’t work for me. [It doesn't work for anyone.] I changed my mind. It’s only a fool that doesn’t change their mind when they know they are wrong. It took tremendous courage to say: “No, sorry, I will change back.”

If only he could, the poor fellow. But judging from the little delicate tap-dance the two of them performed around the details of their "sex life," it seems that the newly reconstructed bits don't do what they're supposed to do. (I note that the Catholic Church would not be able to recognise this man's marriage, since permanent impotence makes it impossible for a man to contract a valid marriage.)

Boy catastrophically screwed up person meets girl other catastrophically screwed up person. I do actually hope they'll be OK, but really, what are the odds?

It's pretty easy for us shake our heads when looking at cases of this cultural insanity that are so outrageous that they attract the attention of the Daily Mail. But we all grew up in the midst of this sexually revolutionised world. Nearly all the kids I went to school with had divorced parents by the time I was twelve. Everyone has been spoonfed these ideas since the early 1970s. We're all brainwashed with it.

How can any of us expect to make happy marriages? How can we have a society that will work when nearly everyone is the walking wounded?

I agree with you that the constant public yelling about sexual deviancy is sick and is intended to erode sexual normalcy; however there are a small number of what let's call legitimate transsexuals.

Any pursuit of the Real includes honest assessment of physical reality. Physical reality includes the fact that while most people's sex is male or female and what is in their heads matches up with what is in their pants there is a small number of people for whom this is not true, and the physical, developmental abnormalities that have led to this situation do not cause abnormality of the spirit anymore than lefthandedness does.

My understanding is as follows: we all start out sexually undifferentiated, and no one, no matter what their chromosonal situation, will develop into a male fetus, who is born a male child, who grows up into an adult man, unless a masculinization process happens in utero. There are various disorders that can interfere with this process, producing a person with a Y chromosone, genetically male, who was yet never fully masculinized.

Similarly, a genetic female, or a person with various abnormal genetic situations, can be masculinized, either in utero or by taking androgens.

Masculinization is a one way street. Therefore a fully masculinized-in-utero adult male who wishes to "become a woman" is probably a nut, yes. But I don't know if this is true of all male-to-female transsexuals. I don't think it is, because I think there are two types - the crazy fetish ones, and the ones who were never fully masculinized or masculinized at all. And I know it isn't true of female-to-male transsexuals. They're just not that crazy, they take hormones and then live, socially, as (short) men.

The whole thing seems to me to be a really bad fit for the attempt to destabilize normal human categories, because before everyone went nuts with "gender theory" in the past generation, transsexuals emphatically did not want to live in some kind of genderless no man's land. They want to be men or women, because they are mostly normal people and normal people recognize the existence of those categories.

"Brava! really, no matter what one does the chromosomes remain XY or XX. end of story..."

No, that's not true. First, there are other, rare possibilities, which will produce an adult who is infertile but still has a sexual identity and has to live in the world as a man or a woman. Second, an XX may be exposed to androgens in utero, leading to masculinization, which leads to observable physical, behavioral, and reported cognitive differences; or an XY may fail to be exposed to those androgens. - Karen

Karen, you should read to the bottom of that First Things article I linked to. It is by a shrink who used to be the head of the shrink dept. at Johns Hopkins who talks about artificially assigning (female) sex to boys born with ambiguous genitalia.

His research led JH to stop doing "gender reassignment" and to advise the medical community not to play along with the politics.

I'm afraid your understanding is mistaken. Sex is determined genetically from the moment of fusion of the gametes and the body of the mother reacts to that determination by producing the appropriate hormones.

karen, i am not indicating chromosomal anomalies that are present at birth. i am merely stating that if one is born XX or XY, no matter what he or she does surgically, those chromosomes will not change.

I'm afraid your understanding is mistaken. Sex is determined genetically from the moment of fusion of the gametes and the body of the mother reacts to that determination by producing the appropriate hormones.

Then is an XY person with complete androgen insensitivity male? Sure, they're genetically male, but before chromosonal typing, there would have been no way to know. Such people mostly live as women and that's the end of it. I have a hard time believing you don't know this. Androgen insensitivity syndrome is pretty famous, since it's often trotted out as gossip about famous women, Jamie Lee Curtis and Wallis Simpson for example. There are other ways that the masculinization process can go haywire. However, people whom this happens to nearly always identify as male or female. I don't see the huge importance of passing judgement on their personal decisions to have surgery on their genitals or not.

It looks like the research at the end of the First Things article is only about cloacal esxtrophy? I'm skimming, I'll go back and read. That's actually evidence for my point, as cloacal estrophy is a major structural birth defect that has zero to do with maternal androgen production or fetal response. Absent surgical intervention, you get a man, with a male brain, who develops male secondary sexual characteristics at puberty, with messed up stuff in his pants. With surgical intervention, you get either a man with worse messed up stuff because the fool doctors tried to give him a fake vulva and a messed up head from people treating him like a girl, or you get a man with the best fake penis modern medicine can provide. XY chromosones, normal androgen production and response, and male identity, just with a birth defect. There is no transsexuality unless it's induced by attempted feminizing socialization.

Anyway I agree that none of this should be a topic for public discussion. It is something that happens to a vanishingly small number of people and those people, again, want to live as men or as women (in the case of complete androgen insensitivity they do live as women of course). Some discretion and kindness would go far.

I wonder if the Church has mistakenly or just never checked baptism certificates etc... when someone like this tries to marry in the Church? Or to have a priest who is fine with the sitation etc.. I wouldn't be surprised if this has happened.

I have read the Paul McHugh article in First Things many times over. Dr McHugh argues that would-be male-to-female transsexuals suffer from a sexual aberration in which the sufferer is aroused by the notion of himself as a woman and convinces himself that he really is one.

I don't doubt that there are indeed many such cases, and that many, perhaps most, of the individuals who demand transsexual surgery fall into this category. But a moment's reflection will tell you that Dr McHugh's assessment was not meant to be comprehensive: he makes no mention at all of female-to-male transsexuals, for example, who are a rarer group, I understand, but not non-existent.

On the other hand, Dr McHugh does mention the unfortunate children born with normal sex chromosomes but with genitalia somehow severely deformed or not present. Such individuals were once automatically assigned a socially feminine "gender* (an appropriate word, because they were not chromosomally female), but usually - though not inevitably - preferred to live as males once they reached adulthood. So even McHugh acknowledges that the problem of sex is more complex than you allow.

And Karen is right: there are some unfortunate individuals in whom the sex-appropriate hormones do not function, although no one knew much about this until quite recently. I have read about these in articles that appear to be very convincing and not politically motivated; see here (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12428202).I'm sure McHugh is aware of them, and neglected to mention them because they are in fact a rare sub-group among the people seeking "gender reassignment" surgery.

You want peer reviewed studies about something you can find on wikipedia? Read the article on androgen insensitivity and follow the links. t's not my anecdotal opinion that an XY person with CAIS would have never known their XY status before - I don't know the date, Miss White probably does since it's one of her subjects. Certainly not before Morgan's work in, what, the 1920s?

This is really simple. Absent masculinization in utero, XY status is not sufficient to produce anyone who would have been recognized as male or felt herself as anything other than a woman. Chromosones aren't enough. This isn't my opinion.

I think there's a misunderstanding here, qualcosa. Karen's not saying that chromosomes can change after birth. She's saying that the "XY = male forever, no matter what!" thing doesn't always fly, and that before we could do chromosomal typing, people with androgen insensitivity lived and died as women throughout history, and in all likelihood many of them were married in the Church or became nuns and lived out their lives as happy women.

Lastly, with respect to the issue of "transsexuals being deluded", I'm going to point you to the Differential Diagnosis section of the DSM IV TR on Gender Identity Disorder which reads:

Insistence by a person with Gender Identity Disorder that he or she is of the other sex is not considered a delusion, because what is invariably meant is that the person feels like a member of the other sex rather than truly believes that he or she is a member of the other sex.

Please, if you are going to opine about a subject, take the time to actually understand it before simply trying to invalidate the lives of others.

Well personally I love it when people come and invalidate my life of knowing a hell of a lot of crazy trannies. Some of them are totally nuts, Dr. McHugh is right, fully masculinized adult men who want to "become women" are crazy and should not be aided in their castration fetish.

But more to the point, unless you live in the SF Bay Area this is statistically almost certainly totally irrelevant to your life. It just shouldn't be a matter of constant public handwringing. - Karen

Has it not occurred to you that there are a lot of transsexuals who transition quietly and just get on with their lives?

The so-called "trans community" is not accurately described by any one locale or grouping.

The studies and evidence I referred to earlier speak to a very different reality when the subject is examined objectively.

I've met some who hang out in the local equivalent of 'tranny central' (as you so derisively call it), and I've met others who don't. Take a wild guess who are generally more successfully socialized. Don't make the mistake that J. Michael Bailey did of taking your entire data sample from something like a gay bar.

"How can any of us expect to make happy marriages? How can we have a society that will work when nearly everyone is the walking wounded?"

We can't, but nothing is impossible with God. I grew up in the 70s and absorbed all the batsh_t, but after I converted, saw it for what it was and rejected it.

My wife and I have been very happily married for 18 years and have raised our kids -- if I may presume to say it -- right. They are believing Catholics and confirmed non-progressives. In other words, they're sane.

Hi Hilary,Adding our site to your list of blogs here doesn't do much for us. You are entitled to your opinions, but we have no admiration for your intolerance. Reading your blog is like being unable to look away from a gruesome car wreck. Frankly, we don't cater to the sort of readers you do, and we're not looking to receive any of their traffic. The last thing I'd want is for the bitterness of this blog to leach over to ours.

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